I've used it for developing Windows Phone 8 applications and tools. It allows for the phone emulator/simulator to run on Windows 8. Other than that, I can't say I've done much with it or had much use for it.

On a side note, it caused a few problems with my network drivers as it runs a virtual network connection. It was a hassle to fix and I thought it'd be worth mentioning.

I have installed a couple of linux distro's including Kubuntu 12.04 and the latest Mint release. After using primarily Virtualbox(also VMWare), it is much easier to setup VM's in Win 8 than win7 with virtualbox, which in and of itself is a miracle. Didnt really expect Win 8 to play friendly with non-MS distros in a VM natively but IT DOES!!! Next test will be Solaris and whatever the hell the Apple virus company is calling their OS now!

ChronoReverse wrote:I wanted to play with it but my current CPU (Q9450) doesn't have SLAT. I guess when Haswell comes out, I have an excuse to upgrade.

This is one of my beefs with Intel in general -- they continue to insist on artificially segmenting their product line by doing stuff like this. Lack of support for ECC RAM on non-Xeon platforms is another one.

zenlessyank wrote:I have installed a couple of linux distro's including Kubuntu 12.04 and the latest Mint release. After using primarily Virtualbox(also VMWare), it is much easier to setup VM's in Win 8 than win7 with virtualbox, which in and of itself is a miracle. Didnt really expect Win 8 to play friendly with non-MS distros in a VM natively but IT DOES!!! Next test will be Solaris and whatever the hell the Apple virus company is calling their OS now!

What did you find difficult about setting up VirtualBox VMs? It doesn't seem particularly difficult to me.

The years just pass like trains. I wave, but they don't slow down.-- Steven Wilson

We used Hyper-V in my Microsoft classes last year. Ran them as Windows Server 2008 R2 under a host of the same flavor if I remember correctly. We did all our work in the guest and it was nice and fast to put your guest back into "beginning state". And response time was quite good on Q6600-era machines (I seem to remember that they were a bit faster than the Q6600, but they were of the same time period; five-ish years old).

I don't really get the comment about it being a bad thing that the host doesn't support/honor Hibernate or Sleep. I wouldn't WANT my host going to sleep while there might be users on one or more of the guests! Unless I do not understand the real issue, that is...

2008/2008 R2 disabled Sleep & Hibernate (and any sub-functions thereof) when the Hyper-V role was installed.

That's perfectly fine for a server, but it's no good for a development or education platform. Since one of those are my use scenario that ruined a perfectly good opportunity to leverage Hyper-V on a laptop.

Server 2012 behaves the same as 2008 when the Hyper-V role is added.

Same problems apply.

Windows 8 is the first edition to have Hyper-V. It has the ability to both Sleep and Hibernate, but loses the ability to do Hybrid Sleep. A desktop and a laptop are not the same as a server. Not only do they have a radically different workload, but the do not serve in some sort of mission critical role. We (end users) are not serving up VDI, hosting services to the Internet, or hosting services to a corporate intranet.

We can save the Earth, still get our job done, and get faster resume times than leveraging the traditional power off and power on boot times.

The functionality matters.

The loss of Hybrid Sleep for a desktop with Hyper-V is a mild irritation. On a desktop it allowed the desktop to stay in permanent sleep by default (you can make it hibernate eventually if you so desire). In the event that a power fail occurs that interrupts the Sleep, you resume from your Hibernate session losing no work.

The loss of Hybrid Sleep for a laptop is a bit of a bigger deal as the normal use case for a laptop involves much more battery usage. By default a laptop will transition from Sleep to Hibernate after 180 minutes. In the event something happens that interrupts the laptop before it has a chance to transition to Hibernate, Hybrid Sleep has you covered. Battery mishaps are real risk with a laptop.

In short this tech gives the desktop and laptop what we'd otherwise consider smartphone, tablet, or appliance style functionality. Instant data access with fault tolerance.

Of course I don't have to explain all the crazy downsides that would come from a laptop that lacked Sleep or Hibernate (Server OS). An issue apparently some were willing to deal with.

I will continue using Hyper-V (it is a primary platform for my work), but I'm hoping they'll fix this oversight at some point.

zenlessyank wrote:I have installed a couple of linux distro's including Kubuntu 12.04 and the latest Mint release. After using primarily Virtualbox(also VMWare), it is much easier to setup VM's in Win 8 than win7 with virtualbox, which in and of itself is a miracle. Didnt really expect Win 8 to play friendly with non-MS distros in a VM natively but IT DOES!!! Next test will be Solaris and whatever the hell the Apple virus company is calling their OS now!

What did you find difficult about setting up VirtualBox VMs? It doesn't seem particularly difficult to me.[/quote]

I found it difficult to let my dislike of Oracle sit on the back burner while I used their software on my machine. Although I never mentioned anything about being difficult.

I imagine that if when things turn ugly, someone will fork it (like what happened with OpenOffice/LibreOffice). Yes, there are some bits of VirtualBox which are proprietary; but the bulk of the functionality is Open Source (someone would need to re-implement the USB 2.0 and RDP functionality).

The years just pass like trains. I wave, but they don't slow down.-- Steven Wilson

Ryu, I hadn't thought of the laptop angle. Yes, I agree that sleep/hibernate should be available if the machine's purpose is to be "non production".

But also, I thought of a possible technical roadblock to that. Maybe when the host goes to sleep, it could give any active guests fits with regards to event logging or database recovery timelines. In such a case, it may have been easier for Microsoft to just disable the feature rather than spend time and money reinventing the world.

JBI, what do you mean by "fork it?" Initially, I thought "stick a fork in it, it's DONE (finished, terminated, kaput). But now I'm thinking you meant "split it into separate forks", aka two separate products...

Ryu, is this sleep behavior only for Hybrid Sleep and Hibernate? I've disabled both of these because of my SSD and the slight chance I could prolong it's life, but use sleep all the time, even while HyperV is running.

I'm running Hyper-V now for all of my Linux virtualization and it's much nicer to work with than Virtualbox. Not needing an update every time I go to use it, consistency between work and home, and a networking system that makes a bit more sense to me are all really nice features of it. The Virtualbox network solution never worked well for me and doesn't really make too much sense to me, whereas the bridged connector is pretty intuitive. I haven't had too much of a reason to use it since I upgraded to Windows 8 though, as I've been playing around with EC2 and doing most of my Linux work there.

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BIF wrote:JBI, what do you mean by "fork it?" Initially, I thought "stick a fork in it, it's DONE (finished, terminated, kaput). But now I'm thinking you meant "split it into separate forks", aka two separate products...

Yeah, the second choice. In the Open Source world, if the organization that is maintaining a widely used product either stops maintaining a product or takes it in a direction that users don't like, a developer (or group of developers) will sometimes split off and start maintaining an independent version of the product. Since the GPL allows for the creation of derivative works, this is perfectly legal. The code maintained by the new developer(s) diverges from the official version, and is referred to as a "fork". If the fork gains enough momentum, then it effectively (though not in name unless the original developer relinquishes rights to the name) becomes the new "official" version of the product; if not, then the fork just fizzles out.

Some examples of successful forking: OpenOffice/LibreOffice, XFree86/X.Org (the X Window system, on which all major *NIX GUIs are currently based), and cdrtools/cdrkit (the infrastructure used by CD/DVD burning tools on most *NIX OSes). When the GNOME foundation abandoned the popular GNOME 2 desktop environment to focus on GNOME 3, the MATE fork was created to continue GNOME 2 development; MATE is now the default desktop on Mint Linux, and is available for many other popular distros as well.

The original inventor of MySQL forked it (creating MariaDB) when Oracle acquired Sun (which had in turn acquired MySQL a few years prior), but it is still unclear whether this fork will gain much traction; this probably depends on how much Oracle manages to piss off the MySQL user community.

The years just pass like trains. I wave, but they don't slow down.-- Steven Wilson